Freeware PDF creator is simple enough for casual use but also suitable for corporate-style automation.

Freeware PDF creators are so plentiful that you can spend long hours testing and comparing them until you find exactly the one you need. After doing exactly that, I kept BullZip PDF Printer on my hard drive and deleted the rest. The application is simple, fast, straightforward, and free (the company does accept PayPal donations, however). From any application, print to the BullZip printer driver, and a tabbed dialog box appears. If you simply click on OK, the driver creates a PDF file in your My Documents folder with the same filename as the original. But if you decide to explore the tabs, you can specify the security and display settings for the PDF file, apply a watermark, and append the output to the top or bottom of another PDF file. Don't expect anything more than the most minimal PDF-creation features from this program, but you get high-quality PDF output, and, best of all, you get it free.

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Different PDF creators can produce slightly different results, and the best quality comes from programs that use either Adobe PostScript, as Acrobat does, or the long-established freeware PostScript clone called Ghostscript, which is used by BullZip. What I liked most about BullZip was its combination of a no-fuss interface with Ghostscript's high-quality output. In contrast, Acrobat's Distiller interface produces the same level of output quality, but requires a lot more in-your-face fuss when creating individual files.

BullZip comes with a separate Options program that lets you change all the program's default settings. Using settings you specify in the options dialog, the program can automatically build any setting that includes a text string (such as an output filename for a PDF, or metadata fields such as document author or title). This means that that the output PDF filename can automatically include the date or time, your user name, the title of the document, the filename of the original (with or without extensions such as .DOC or .XLS), and other information.

Unlike many other basic PDF Creators, BullZip doesn't let you specify the zoom level used when Adobe Reader opens a PDF file for viewing. This is a minor limitation, though, since anyone can change the level while viewing a PDF, and few PDF authors will care about specifying the initial level. BullZip also doesn't give you the kind of conversion features that translate Microsoft Word comments into PDF annotation, but if you want that kind of feature, you should look at a commercial package such as Acrobat or PDF Converter Professional.

BullZip also lacks the ability to save separate profiles for different sets of output options. Instead, the software lets you create multiple PDF "printers" with different names, each one with a different set of options. The effect is the same, but I prefer BullZip's method, because from the standard Windows print dialog's list of installed printers, I can select the specific PDF printer with the options I want instead of having to hunt down the list of Profiles from an options dialog, as in other programs.

A link on the BullZip Web site lets you download the latest version of Ghostscript directly from the Ghostscript server. In contrast, many other freeware PDF programs insist on downloading and installing an outdated release even if you already have a later one.

Unlike most other free and low-cost PDF creators, you can control BullZip from the Windows command prompt, which means it's suitable for automated corporate and other advanced applications that run without intervention. The program is constantly updated in response to requests on its online support forum, and anything it can't do now is something it's likely to be able to do soon. If you don't need to attach comments or require other collaboration features in your PDF files, BullZip PDF Printer gets the job done efficiently, with quality equal to the best, and it costs nothing to use.

BullZip PDF Printer

BullZip PDF Printer

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